Sublime

Charles Marsh, as owner of the only district-wide organ of public opinion, was perhaps the individual in Johnson’s congressional district most important to his continuation in office. His love affair with Marsh’s lover was, in the words of a man familiar with the relationship, “taking one hell of a chance.” And, this man adds, “Knowing Lyndon, I co

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

He was college president until 1973; he ran for the Senate in 1976, aged seventy, becoming a Republican for the first time.

RICHARD RUSSELL ROSE AS RAPIDLY in the nation’s Senate as he had in his state’s legislature, in part because he displayed the same quiet, polite but unbending independence in Washington as he had in Atlanta, and in part because a rare concatenation of coincidences turned that independence into an asset instead of a liability. The moment at which Ru